Thursday, April 22, 2010

Fire on the Deepwater Horizon

There was a blowout and fire out on the Deepwater Horizon
which was working for BP in Mississippi Canyon 252, which is the
Maconda field. From Rigzone, it appears that they've found everyone,
yahoo is still saying 11 men are missing though, so I hope Rigzone is
correct

They were trying to plug and abandon the well after an exploration well,
I'd guess they did a well test and were trying to set a plug afterwards so
that they can move the rig to the next well, and either they swabbed in
a kick by moving the drillpipe up too quickly, or perhaps they thought they had
the well killed after the well test and it bit them in the ass. (I have no idea
what happened, i'm just speculating).

It's interesting to me because it scares the hell out of me, the idea of having to
evacuate from a burning rig is pretty much the worst case for the oilfield. On
land you can just run away, in shallow water maybe swim to land or another rig,
but in deepwater there is usually nothing within miles, and the water is 5000' deep.
To carry out an evacuation and not lose anyone is an amazing feat, and depends completely
on the professionalism of the workers of transocean and bp.

[picture from
Rigzone, better
version there)

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